Micro-social Level Research Articles

Community-centered responses to Ebola in urban Liberia: the view from below.

BackgroundThe West African Ebola epidemic has demonstrated that the existing range of medical and epidemiological responses to emerging disease outbreaks is insufficient, especially in post-conflict contexts with exceedingly poor healthcare infrastructures. In this context, community-based responses have proven vital for containing Ebola virus disease (EVD) and shifting the epidemic curve. Despite a surge in interest in local innovations that effectively contained the epidemic, the mechanisms for community-based response remain unclear. This study provides baseline information on community-based epidemic control priorities and identifies innovative local strategies for containing EVD in Liberia.Methodology/Principal FindingsThis study was conducted in September 2014 in 15 communities in Monrovia and Montserrado County, Liberia – one of the epicenters of the Ebola outbreak. Findings from 15 focus group discussions with 386 community leaders identified strategies being undertaken and recommendations for what a community-based response to Ebola should look like under then-existing conditions. Data were collected on the following topics: prevention, surveillance, care-giving, community-based treatment and support, networks and hotlines, response teams, Ebola treatment units (ETUs) and hospitals, the management of corpses, quarantine and isolation, orphans, memorialization, and the need for community-based training and education. Findings have been presented as community-based strategies and recommendations for (1) prevention, (2) treatment and response, and (3) community sequelae and recovery. Several models for community-based management of the current Ebola outbreak were proposed. Additional findings indicate positive attitudes towards early Ebola survivors, and the need for community-based psychosocial support.Conclusions/SignificanceLocal communities’ strategies and recommendations give insight into how urban Liberian communities contained the EVD outbreak while navigating the systemic failures of the initial state and international response. Communities in urban Liberia adapted to the epidemic using multiple coping strategies. In the absence of health, infrastructural and material supports, local people engaged in self-reliance in order to contain the epidemic at the micro-social level. These innovations were regarded as necessary, but as less desirable than a well-supported health-systems based response; and were seen as involving considerable individual, social, and public health costs, including heightened vulnerability to infection.

Pathways to Attrition: A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Justifications for Police Designations of Sexual Assault Complaints

The present analysis is a reframing of an earlier study conducted by the author to compensate for perceived deficiencies in previous studies on police decisions in sexual assault complaints. Specifically, qualitative comparative analysis was employed at the micro-social level to reveal justification scenarios, employed by investigating officers, which resulted in attrition at the police level. It was found that police employed the legal model in justifying “unfounded” designations while police employed both legal and extralegal models in justifying designations of “departmental discretion.” Further rese arch, expanding the database through interview s and participant observation, is necessary to fully explore justification scenarios for police designations of sexual assault complaints

Pupils’ Misconceptions as a Psychosocial Barrier in the Context of Inclusive Education

Pivarc Jakub, Pupils’ Misconceptions as a Psychosocial Barrier in the Context of Inclusive Education [Bledne wyobrazenia uczniow jako bariera psychospoleczna w kontekście edukacji wlączającej]. Studia Edukacyjne nr 37, 2015, Poznan 2015, pp. 363-376. Adam Mickiewicz University Press. ISBN 978-83-232-2967-4. ISSN 1233-6688. DOI: 10.14746/se.2015.37.21 During the totalitarian regime the Czech education system significantly hindered or entirely prevented pupils with a developmental disability to exercise their right to education. Since 1989, the Czech schooling system has undergone a distinct transformation. In line with the qualities of today’s postmodern society, the idea of inclusion has been one of the changes, but has been evolving only at a theoretical level so far. Inclusive education is clearly a solution for pupils with a developmental disability, which in turn leads to equal and effective education. Some obstacles within the practical application of inclusion may be negative attitudes, incorrect understanding, prejudices and invalid generalisations (misconceptions) of intact pupils about their peers who have a developmental disability. The paper discusses psychosocial barriers at a microsocial level in a classroom which may inhibit the inclusion process. The main focus is on the issue of pupils’ misconceptions and some strategies to overcome them.

Social Dialogue, Communication, Synergy Bonds and Unification with the Romanian Immigrants Background

Communication and social dialogue are the basic organization and social development. Human relationships are influenced by social interactions on micro-social level and macro-social level, without neglecting the role of the individual. People live together and interact in pursuit of common goals and the formation of communities as a result of belief, knowledge that is based on a common understanding. Romanian immigrant environments enable communication allowing similar ways of response, leading to emotional and intellectual provisions of the same rank. Social interaction and dialogue with the local populations of migrants and indigenous enable them to act, to integrate more easily, to be known and recognized and reflected upon. Communication and interpersonal relations are a necessity without which people or social groups cannot exist. On-line publications and sites created by Romanians everywhere, trying to establish a permanent communication language with a focus on what is happening in the country and aimed at promoting Romanian identity. Migrants with different origins, within common living areas, trying to communicate and evolve to a state of harmony, an uniform formation, helping to improve community life. Social interactions are influenced by the actions of individuals, groups, through the manifestation of conditions and performance. Romanian immigrants are found all over 30 countries in Europe and within 20 countries around the world, the migration of Romanians in the world has been going on since the second half of the nineteenth century.

Home Sweet Messy Home: Managing Symbolic Pollution

Hanging up our coat, tidying our desk, classifying our books, what meanings do these mundane practices convey? Extending Mary Douglas's work, this article investigates tidiness from the angle of symbolic pollution. Based on photo-elicitation, it shows that, similarly to symbolic pollution described at a macro-social level, tidiness depends on two conditions, namely, a set of classifications and the dangerous transgression of these classifications. However, at a micro-social level, individuals negotiate boundaries between classifications in order to cope with symbolic pollution. Consumers define their domestic classifications through a juxtaposition of micro-practices, which does not necessarily create a hierarchically ordered system but which enables these consumers to avoid anomalies and transgressions. Furthermore, respondents are willing to break tidiness rules on specific occasions because the danger-beliefs associated with transgression are context-dependent. This analysis of tidiness gives new insights into materiality, emphasizing the cultural meaning of ordering one's possessions.

Discordance Through Consensus: Unintended Consequences of the Quest for Consensuality in Zambian Religious Life

This article takes the example of religion in Zambia, and more particularly African-initiated Christianity, to explore how people in the Gwembe valley deal with differences in religious outlook and practice. Present-day religious practices in the Gwembe valley are pluralist, dynamic and characterised by blurred boundaries that are re-negotiated according to context and situation. Yet this religious pluralism only rarely leads to open conflicts because people tend to keep a low profile during everyday interactions between members of different religious communities, doing their best to avoid arguments either by staying clear of delicate issues or by striving to come up with a minimum consensus. At the same time, when focusing on what in particular is consented to from a more abstract point of view, it becomes clear that there are marked contradictions to the consensuses reached, even when the ethnographer follows one and the same person through a sequence of interactions with different participants. Thus, in contrast to Max Gluckman's famous remark that ‘conflicts in one set of relationships, over a wider range of society or through a longer period of time, lead to the re-establishment of social cohesion’, it is the stress on consensuality on the micro-social level that produces discordance on the macro level of sociality.

The geopolitics of northern travels: enactments of adventure and exploration in the Norwegian-Russian borderland

Critical geopolitics is used in analysing discourses on a micro-social level in the performances and enactments taking place during fact-finding tours and leisure journeys in northernmost Europe. The cases of journeys focussed are those of Scandinavians travelling along, and sometimes departing from, the highway between the Norwegian village of Kirkenes and the Russian city of Murmansk. In travels undertaken for professional or leisure purposes alike a hyperreal meta-script is enacted mediated on the cosmopolitan cultural experiences held collectively by the travellers; simulacra provide the context for the enactments of fact-finding and drama taking place during border-passage. It is argued that the characteristic montage-like sequence of events of border-crossings are interwoven with a geopolitical discourse, and that it should be understood as encompassing both language and practice in order to appreciate the geopolitics at work. Three ways in which geopolitics enters travels in the northern borderland between Scandinavia and Russia are identified: scenarios of future regional scenarios of future regional developments, popularisations of research obsessed with the problems of borders, and what has been termed here the geopolitical anecdote. In considering the aesthetics of the simulations taking place in cross-border travels this study suggests focussing the meta-script of the American and the European road movie film genres. The essay argues that the cosmopolitan mind of any traveller, and its collective mediated content of cultural and political discourses, has been underestimated so far in the socio-political research regarding the borderlands of the European north.

English

This study focuses on specific elements of local and international cultures in two of the most widely used textbook collections for Catalan as a second language (CSL). Adapting a methodology used by Ramirez & Hall (1990), the study first gives quantitative analysis of the geographical references to Catalonia and the rest of the world in form of a large text (more than 50 words) or an image. The results show that Catalan culture is favored over international cultures, but that, in most cases, textbooks give a simplified view on both Catalan and international cultures. Catalonia and several other countries are often presented from a tourist-consumer point of view, without any substantial cultural information. Furthermore, the study suggests that textbooks avoid cultural comparisons therefore, giving little space for cultural understanding. The results presented in this paper form part of a wider research about the sociocultural models that current CSL textbooks transmit. Local and International Cultures in Catalan as a Second Language Textbooks 208 Local and International Cultures in Catalan as a Second Language Textbooks The aim of this article is to examine how local and international cultures are presented in textbooks designed for adult learners of Catalan as a second language (CSL). As its starting point, this study takes the view that the textbooks are never neutral (Apple, 1999) and that CSL textbooks give learners a biased version of a culture international and their host country’s culture. Since Canale and Swain’s (1980) model of communicative competence, cultural aspects have increasingly been incorporated to second language (L2) pedagogy. The relation between L2 learning and culture has been acknowledged in the works of Kramsch (1993), Byram (1997), and Moran (2001), among others. The increased emphasis on teaching culture in recent decades has led to the introduction of cultural elements in most textbooks (Santos, 2007). Several researches (Alptekin, 1993; Batteman & Mattos, 2006; Cortazzi & Jin, 1999; Ramirez & Hall, 1990; Risager, 1991; among others ) have analyzed the cultural component of second language textbooks. However, textbooks for learning Catalan as a second language have rarely been a subject of any kind of analysis, especially one that takes a sociocultural perspective. Statement of the problem This article is just an initial step in the direction of analyzing constructions of culture in CSL textbooks following the four dimensions of analyzing culture proposed by Byram & Esarte-Sarries (1991): • analysis at the micro-social level of the social identity of individuals, of their social environment, of their personality. Journal of Foreign Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics 209 • analysis at the macro-social level of socio-economic, geographic and historical representations. • analysis of the viewpoint taken by the author, either explicitly or implicitly. • analysis at the inter-cultural level of mutual representations and recognition by the nature and foreign cultures (p.180). In this paper, the focus will be on the macro-social level of socioeconomic, and more specifically on geographic representations that appear in textbooks. To this end, this study will try to answer the following research questions: 1. What type of representation of local and international culture appears in large texts and images that refer to a geographical reference? 2. What are the differences and similarities in representations of local and international cultures?

Leverging Knowledge and Networks: A Creative Projects Perspective on Entrepreneurial Action

This paper extends tertius iungens social network dynamics to theorize the micro-social level of entrepreneurial activity – the social dynamics of relatively small numbers of actors surrounding the formation and early growth of new ventures. We animate these ideas with a focus a project-based view of entrepreneurship that emphasizes the collective action in which initial entrepreneurial groups define emergent goals and aggregate people and resources toward realizing them. This theoretical framework has as its central conceptual components tertius iungens connecting activity and creative project action trajectories. Our perspective offers insights into the social processes associated with new venture formation while integrating and extending key elements from a growing body of work on entrepreneurial action. By illuminating the initial stages of emergent entrepreneurial action, our study clarifies social processes surrounding new venture initiatives while suggesting ways to advance entrepreneurship theory ...

Durkheim and Weber on the social implications of new information and communication technologies

Max Weber and Emile Durkheim made an important contribution to our understanding of new information and communication technologies (ICTs). While they did not discuss ICTs in their work, they provided conceptual tools at the macro-, meso- and micro-social levels that help us understand the use of ICTs. We examine how Weber’s iron cage and Durkheim’s mechanical solidarity and ritual present a coherent account of how ICTs sustain cohesion and also enmesh us in mediated interactions in complex societies. Thus, they directly address the question of the implications of increasingly mediated relationships, which is overlooked by theories that focus only on the relation between individuals and technology. Unlike other theorists who do focus on the societal level, Weber and Durkheim are more concerned with their routine workings, providing a more grounded, everyday, and in this sense realistic understanding of ICTs and social change.

No past, no future Appunti per una fenomenologia del presente

This work tries to identify the reasons of present social inconvenience in loosing great ideals of identity reference, both metasocially than metapsychically, ruling life in human community. This inconvenience is embodied, at a microsocial level, in present psychic pathologies which convey human difficulties to realize a full process of subjectification. The renewal of the idea of a democratic development of justice and solidarity and a new way of interpreting the relational exchange, can create new conditions to go out of this epochal crisis.

Sport als Sucht Zur Soziologie einer stoffungebundenen Abhängigkeit /

Zusammenfassung Die Zahl jener Akteure, die sich in ihrer Freizeit exzessiv und unter Absehen der dadurch ausgelösten psychischen, physischen und sozialen Konsequenzen dem Sport hingeben, ist in den letzten Jahren stark angestiegen. Sportmedizin und Sportpsychologie haben hierfür den Begriff „exercise addiction“ geprägt und eine Vielzahl wichtiger Erkenntnisse hervorgebracht. Im Unterschied zu der in diesen Disziplinen üblichen Vorgehensweise, die psychischen und physischen Aspekte des Themas personalisierend in den Vordergrund zu rücken, um das stoffungebundene Suchtverhalten im Sport zu erklären, wählt der vorliegende Beitrag einen soziologischen Zugang. Die Sportsucht wird folglich als soziales Phänomen behandelt und analytisch auf einer makro-, meso- und mikrogesellschaftlichen Ebene verortet. Die soziokulturellen Bedingungen sportsüchtigen Handelns lassen sich so präzise herausarbeiten. Vor allem wird auch deutlich gemacht, warum immer mehr Menschen gerade den Sport als Suchtfeld nutzen. Damit präsentiert der Text erstmalig den Entwurf einer Soziologie der Sportsucht.

A constructionist approach for the study of strategy as social practice

The goal of this paper is to present an analytical perspective of strategy as social practice in organizations by the articulation of proposals by Foucault, Certeau and Moscovici on social dynamics. To accomplish its intents it discusses the convergences and divergences between social dynamics in Foucault (1972, 1999, 2003a, 2003b), knowledge, power and subjectivities from Moscovici (1961), and Social Representation Theory (SRT) as articulated with the concept of everyday strategies and tactics by Certeau (1990). The paper presents the micro and macro delineations in investigations involving strategy-making practices in organizations over time. The studies of strategy as social practices are focused only on the micro-social level of CEO practices in organizations and don't consider the involvement of these practices at the macro-social level. Thus, this paper aims at acknowledging the roles played by experimentation and by the researcher's theoretical position, but also at offering the actors an opportunity to present the micro and macro aspects that involve their strategy practices in a given organization. This way, a dynamic reference is obtained that allows for the comparison of empirical data in the analysis of strategy as a social practice.

Access to Catch-Up HPV Vaccination among Latina University Students

HPV is the most prevalent sexually transmitted infection (STI) in the United States. The HPV vaccine protects against four HPV strains that cause 90 percent of anogenital warts and 70 percent of cervical cancers. The study's primary objective was to examine access to and knowledge of the HPV vaccine among Latina university students in Denver, Colorado. Between August 2007 and May 2008, 15 Latina university students and four key informants were interviewed. Critical medical anthropology frames the results of this qualitative exploratory study. Barriers at the macro-social, intermediate-social, micro-social, and individual levels hamper access to the HPV vaccine. Factors that affected access include: financial cost, the United States employer-based health insurance model, policies of health care facilities and educational institutions, relationships between participants and their health care providers, and individual knowledge and beliefs. Recommendations to increase access to the HPV vaccine are drawn from...

Psychic wounds and the social structure: An empirical investigation

Empirical linkages between structure and agency, or system and life world, have traditionally not been overabundant in sociology, though work emerging in the field of the sociology of emotions does offer some illumination on this topic. This article uses data obtained in a project which investigated the impact of the Howard government’s dual reforms in the industrial relations and welfare policy arenas. In this article, we seek to explore in some depth how a system that is underpinned by the notion of dignity and rights produces shame in its supposed beneficiaries, based on the evidence in the data collected. As well, we attempt to expose the processes by which shame is produced and how it manifests among the participants in the study. The first part of the article focuses upon the broader structural context, while the second proceeds to examine how this impinges upon agents at the microsocial level. Workfare recipients are constructed as dependants, in a society that privileges independence and ignores the crucial fact of our mutual interdependency. The transcripts reveal that the denial of autonomy and respect are key mechanisms by which dignity is injured. In exploring these phenomena, the purpose of the article is to demonstrate the usually veiled connections between individuals and their larger social context.

Gang change and evolutionary theory

While most street gangs are temporary and disorganized, some have institutionalized, and a number of these show signs of evolving into more serious criminal enterprises, becoming more networked, technologically savvy and internationalized, less visible, more predatory and sometimes more violent. The boundaries that researchers have drawn between gangs and other types of criminal groups, particularly organized crime, are becoming blurred. Understanding why this is happening is crucial to planning effective responses. This article suggests that evolutionary theory, involving processes of variation, selection and replication, would constitute a valuable tool for this purpose. Using an evolutionary framework would enable the application of a longitudinal perspective to the microsocial level of analysis, the gang itself, which until now has not had as much attention as other levels of analysis in gang research. Taking inspiration from evolutionary theories in organizational sociology and economics, this article explores how evolutionary theory might be used to understand gang change and locate gangs within evolutionary sequences. It argues that adopting an evolutionary perspective will improve the capacity of law enforcement agencies to focus scarce resources where they are most needed and to plan and implement successful interventions.

A estratégia como prática social nas organizações: articulações entre representações sociais, estratégias e táticas cotidianas

Strategy as social practice in organizations: links between social representations, strategies and everyday tactics The aim of this article is to propose a theoretical and methodological approach that allows the study of strategizing in organizations. It is based on an approach that regards strategy as a social practice, in which both the macrosocial and microsocial contexts and their boundaries are displayed by the subjects ever since they joined those very contexts in which they conduct their practices. This approach sometimes emphasizes the microsocial level of practices involving the activities of people and, at other times, the macrosocial level of the contextual influences upon these practices. This points to the need to establish boundaries between the two levels, a task usually performed a priori by the researcher (WILSON and JARZABKOWSKI, 2004). Thus, this article offers a proposal that allows one to acknowledge the space of social subjects in order to determine these boundaries. To this end, the following theoretical contributions are linked in the text: thoughts on the idea of management as a social practice (REED, 1989) and of social representations that offer an alternative for dealing with the contextual limitations that involve the activities of people within and outside organizations (MOSCOVICI, 1961); and the everyday strategies and tactics of these very same people, showing ways in which the activities involve the relations of converging and diverging interests (CERTEAU, 1994).

Coffee, Connoisseurship, and an Ethnomethodologically-Informed Sociology of Taste

Coffee is an important commodity and an important comestible, one that is momentous not only for nations’ economies but also, at the micro-social level, as a resource for interpersonal sociability. Among a subculture of certain coffee connoisseurs, the coffee itself is a topic that is an organizing focus of, and for, that sociability. This paper is an empirical investigation of online narratives produced by hobbyist participants in what coffee aficionados refer to as the “third wave” coffee phenomenon and engages and challenges extant perspectives social aspects of “taste” by inspecting members’ insights concerning their conceptions of taste and their participation in a subculture that comprises taste as an important, central defining aspect. The analytic point of view deployed in this paper is ethnomethodological, one that, instead of emphasizing a priori the social structural characteristics of these connoisseurs as do Bourdieu (In: Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, tr. Richard Nice, Routledge, New York 1984) and those who work in his tradition, emphasizes discovery of members’ own displayed understandings of the topic at hand. As such, this paper is more than an investigation of the “coffee geek” subculture but is also an invitation to an ethnomethodologically-informed sociology of “taste.”

Crossing the Implementation Line: The Mutual Constitution of Technology and Organizing Across Development and Use Activities

A growing number of studies suggest that technological change and organizational change must be closely linked at the microsocial level of analysis. However, most extant research has explicitly linked technological change to activities surrounding a technology’s development and organizational change to activities surrounding a technology’s use. This article suggests that when researchers view technological and organizational change as discontinuous events separated by the act of implementation, they di scredit the important role that organizations play in the development of technologies, and that the material features of technologies play in the process of organizing. To overcome this empirically inaccurate tendency we must cross the artificial empirical and theoretical divide, which I term the implementation line existing between our studies of technology development and use. In so doing, I outline a framework that treats technological and organizational change as mutually constitutive in nature.

Sociology of pharmaceuticals development and regulation: a realist empirical research programme

A realist conceptualization of interests is proposed in opposition to the fashionable view that interests, objectivity and reality are merely social constructs, and that sociological analyses should be confined to discourse, actor-networks and micro-contextual practices. The objective interests of pharmaceutical companies in profit-maximization, and of patients/public health in the optimisation of drugs' benefit-risk ratios, can be empirically validated. The relationship between those interests and pharmaceutical regulation is best characterised by 'neo-liberal corporate bias' at the macro- and meso-levels. How such bias manifests itself at the micro-social level of science-based pharmaceutical testing and regulatory decision making is examined using a realist sociology of scientific knowledge, which appreciates that assessment of the validity of techno-scientific knowledge claims is essential for their sociological explanation. Commercial interests are shown to have biased science away from the interests of public health, in favour of industry. International comparisons of drug regulation demonstrate that drug injuries are not necessarily an inevitable by-product of pharmaceutical progress because some countries have fewer drug safety problems than others. Similarly, the lowering of techno-scientific standards for drug safety testing is not an inevitable cost of faster development of therapeutically valuable medicines, but a consequence of the internationalization of neo-liberal corporate bias.